Politico on the FDA

How did the authors of the Politico investigation into the FDA’s performance rate the agency’s role in addressing health concerns? This passage sums it up:

By all accounts, the country is also in the middle of a diet-related disease crisis, something that made millions of Americans even more vulnerable to severe illness and death from Covid-19. Even before the pandemic, poor diet was one of the biggest drivers of health care costs and premature death in the United States. This is not your run-of-the-mill slow-churning Washington bureaucracy. FDA’s food division is so slow, it’s practically in its own league. . . There is a remarkable level of consensus that the agency is simply not working. Current and former officials and industry professionals used terms like “ridiculous,” “impossible,” “broken,” “byzantine” and “a joke” to describe the state of food regulation at FDA.

The USDA often receives the brunt of criticism for failure to support a healthy food system, alongside criticism of health care payers for failing to invest adequately in “upstream” prevention for diet-related conditions (or, increasingly, in holistic “downstream” treatments for those conditions once they emerge). See, for example, this 2021 GAO report. However, the Food and Drug Administration is where food and medicine literally meet. Other stories addressing this intersection have included investigations into what we know about addictive substances and even how closely intertwined the origins of the study of flavor are with the study of what makes medicines more palatable.

Read the Politico investigation online here.